INhonolulu Magazine Issue #15 - March 2014 | Page 26

it was still pretty cool. Everyone loved it. That was when I first started started thinking about modding games and getting in to game development—in 8th grade [laughs].” Robertson also wanted to be a DJ when he was young, explaining an early fascination with electronically produced music. When everyone else in middle school was listening to rap, pop, alternative or jawaiian music, Robertson was already addicted to techno. “When I was a kid, my parents bought me this DJ toy called Mixman Studio—it was a little plastic MIDI controller with fake turn-tables and sample buttons and stuff,” he laughs. “It was actually pretty cool: You could Profile / Trent Robertson Electric Voodoo Will Caron Photos by Jimmy Edens Engineer, programmer, composer, DJ and inventor: Trent Robertson is a digital-age renaissance man. F or Trent Robertson, there’s something magical about the creation and integration of sound and light through electrical signals. Since he began building his own electronic devices, Robertson has been fascinated with the idea of combining his electrical engineering education with software writing and musical composition to produce amazing audio-visual displays. “When I was about to graduate from the undergraduate program, I had an epiphany,” Robertson tells me Page 26 during our interview in the Holmes Hall fabrication lab on the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa campus. “I realized that audio is just an analog electric signal that oscillates, and if I filter it and amplify it, I should be able to light something up with that signal.” A 3-D printer, a milling machine and several other devices that are lost on me whir and hum as Robertson shows me around his lab. Now a graduate student tasked with running the “fab lab” and teaching undergraduates how to use the machines, Robertson explains how he became head of the lab. “I was in the right place at the right time, really,” says Robertson. “I only moved into this lab because there was a piece of machinery in here that I needed for my research at the time.” That piece of equipment is a Semi-Conductor Parameter Analyzer that Robertson was using for a contract with the Navy to test their transistors. “So I started working in this lab and then, one day, this new milling machine appeared,” he continues. “It was actually purchased by a different lab, HSFL (the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory), but they didn’t have a place to put it. This lab is pretty big, so they put it in here. I helped them shoot a tutorial series on how to use it and, therefore, I learned how to use it too. It was in my space, I had the right people teach me, and then I suddenly became the only person using it.” Now, Robertson has taken it upon himself to mentor students on how to design and fabricate circuits, as well as how to maintain professional-grade, industrial equipment. “My professor, Dr. David Garmire— who was actually nominated for a teaching excellence award this year— was always confident in my ability to create,” Robertson elaborates. “That’s why he targeted me as an undergraduate to work for him in grad school. “As an electrical engineer as well, I know how to convert between time-domain signals and frequency-domain signals, meaning I can sample a bit of audio and r \